Skin in the Game

Under Armour knows athletes. Can it sell to everyone else?

The company’s great strength, the C.E.O. says, is that “we let you believe.”

Photograph by Robbie Fimmano

The logo for Under Armour, the sporting-goods company, consists of two overlapping parabolas, opening in opposite directions, which suggest the company’s initials. If you start looking for it, you may find that you see it all the time. In 1999, Jamie Foxx wore Under Armour in “Any Given Sunday”; in 2009, in the fourth season of “Friday Night Lights,” a compassionate Under Armour sales representative helped Coach Taylor secure new uniforms for his beleaguered East Dillon Lions. The company has the exclusive rights to equip athletes at thirteen colleges, among them Notre Dame, which became an Under Armour school in January, after signing a ten-year deal that is reportedly worth around ninety million dollars. Under Armour’s roster of paid endorsers includes the skier Lindsey Vonn, the quarterback Tom Brady, and the duck dynast Willie Robertson. Its roster of unpaid endorsers includes President Obama, who was photographed clutching a pair of its high-tops on one occasion and wearing a warmup jacket on another. George Zimmerman is evidently a fan: last year, when he was detained by police after an argument with his estranged wife, he was wearing an Under Armour baseball hat. And, during an infamous “60 Minutes” interview about the attack in Benghazi, the former security contractor Dylan Davies was shown wearing a sober black T-shirt, plain except for a pair of small gray parabolas on its left breast.

These are clothes designed for serious activity, though many customers have noticed that they are no less suitable for serious inactivity. As a consequence, the logo seems to turn up anywhere in the country where people are dressed casually and comfortably, which is just about everywhere—Under Armour helps supply America’s national uniform. Even so, the company’s image is maximally sports-centric: customers are referred to as “athletes,” and the changing rooms at some stores are stocked with complimentary bottles of water, in case anyone gets dehydrated while squeezing into the tight-fitting shirts that are the brand’s signature product. The company’s athlete-in-chief is Kevin Plank, who founded Under Armour in 1996, after a college football career at the University of Maryland. “Under Armour means performance,” he likes to say, but this reputation may have been besmirched last month, in Sochi, when the U.S. speed-skating team was outraced by much of the rest of the world. Some athletes and commentators wondered whether the team’s new suits, manufactured by Under Armour in collaboration with the aerospace company Lockheed Martin, might have provided a disadvantage. Plank decried the accusation as a “witch hunt,” while carefully avoiding any criticism of the skaters themselves. He knew that there was no functional connection between the drag reduction of Under Armour’s speed-skating suits and the quality of its retail product line, but he knew that customers might confuse the two—in fact, the company had spent years and more than a million dollars on the suit in the expectation that they would.

Under Armour’s main offices occupy a former Procter & Gamble factory complex, a ten-acre cluster of warehouses on the Baltimore waterfront. The campus is bisected by an active railroad, but most of the other industrial hallmarks have been thoroughly overhauled. The concrete wharf is now a half-size football field, sodded with artificial turf, and from the window of Plank’s office you can see three molasses-storage tanks that have been refitted as cylindrical Under Armour billboards bearing portraits of three local sports heroes: Michael Phelps, Cal Ripken, Jr., and Ray Lewis. On a rainy Friday morning, Plank had just flown back from South Bend, Indiana, where he had finished negotiating the Notre Dame deal. Plank is forty-one, and he doesn’t look especially footballish: he is fit but average-sized, with a restless and analytic temperament that makes plain his allergy to indecision—he speaks, often, like a coach rushing through his halftime pep talk so he can get back to the game. Thirteen hundred people work at the Baltimore offices, all of them answering, ultimately, to the same hands-on boss; no meeting seems complete without at least a brief chorus of “Kevin wants” and “Kevin says” and “Kevin thinks.” During a recent retail-strategy session, one participant asked, only half in jest, if anyone knew Plank’s upcoming travel schedule—he wanted stores along the itinerary to be ready, in case Plank turned up for an impromptu inspection.

Plank always wears Under Armour, which doesn’t mean that he conducts business in sweatpants. He is, he says, “a Tom Ford guy,” albeit one who finds himself annoyed that twelve-hundred-dollar blazers might not be designed to withstand rough treatment. He says, “You’re telling me that nobody reinforced this button that I’m buttoning and unbuttoning twenty-five times during the course of the day? I look at that and I go, ‘How does someone accept that?’ ” On this day, he was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt, dark-gray slacks, Gucci loafers, and a Breitling watch with a face the size of a poker chip. This outfit lent a luxurious aura to the windbreaker he had on, a sleek gray prototype with a discreet black logo on the front and a less discreet neon-green vertical stripe on the back, spelling out “Under Armour” in negative space.

Plank objects when people describe Under Armour as a sportswear company, even though “sportswear” is an accurate description of just about everything it currently makes. (Under Armour can be found in all sorts of stores, but no store sells more of it than Dick’s Sporting Goods.) He sees no reason that the company’s obsession with “performance,” and with exotic materials—novel polyester blends, water-resistant cotton, extra-compressive spandex—should be limited to athletics. Plank’s favorite building on campus is the innovation lab, which requires a special key fob and a vascular scan for entry, and which retains a self-conscious air of secrecy; behind the second of two doors is a row of mannequins, all shrouded in black, like Supreme Court Justices. The lab is run by Kevin Haley, a former S.E.C. lawyer, who takes a hobbyist’s delight in the arsenal over which he presides: an assortment of 3-D printers, climate-controlled chambers, motion-capture cameras, and—for old-fashioned but crucial stress tests—washing machines. Although Haley is neither a designer nor an engineer, he can talk convincingly about the proprioceptive benefits of high-top cleats, the proper mechanics of a sports bra (it should minimize jerk, instead of trying to eliminate jostling), and the way that excessive stitching can make sneakers rigid.

In keeping with the company’s new focus, Haley downplayed Under Armour’s most specialized products even while bragging about them. “There’s nothing funner than working on a speed-skating suit,” he said. “There’s a single purpose: you want to go as fast as possible; it’s all about aerodynamics. But I think it’s even cooler to work on something you can wear to work.” One of the lab’s proudest inventions is ColdGear Infrared, an insulation system meant to provide warmth without bulk. (The technology was purportedly inspired by a “powderized ceramic” that protects military aircraft.) This fall, some of Under Armour’s winter jackets will also feature something called MagZip, a magnetic clasp system that will, Haley promises, make it easy to zip up a jacket with one hand.

Plank, too, likes to emphasize the importance of Under Armour’s non-specialized clothes, because he knows that plenty of his current and future customers really aren’t athletes, no matter how broadly one defines the term. He says, “If I told you this jacket’s been to the Himalayas, you’re going, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to the Himalayas, but if anything ever happens I’ve got an extra layer of protection—I’ve got something you don’t.’ It’s like a superpower.” He thinks a lot these days about making clothes you can wear with jeans. Like many ambitious C.E.O.s before him, Plank is betting that his company can broaden its focus while retaining that magical brand power which induces customers to trust, and to spend, more than they otherwise might.

When Plank talks about Under Armour, he often sounds as if he were selling something more important and less tangible than performance apparel. At times, a kind of religious conviction creeps into his sales pitch. “Do we make the best product? You’re darn right,” he said in a recent promotional speech. “I’ll march twenty scientists in here and tell you why we have the best product in the world. But, most importantly, we let you believe.”

Even as a boy, Plank was an industrious salesman, and one of his early successes came with a product that he later worked to make obsolete: the plain cotton T-shirt. He grew up in Kensington, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, where his father was a real-estate developer and his mother was, for much of his childhood, the mayor. (She later worked in Reagan’s State Department.) He had four older brothers, and proved the most valuable player in the various businesses they formed together, including an initiative to sell bootleg T-shirts to Grateful Dead fans. He went to high school at St. John’s, a football-loving Catholic prep school in Washington, where he became fixated on the sport. To increase his chances of making a college team, he spent a postgraduate year at Fork Union, a private military academy in Virginia known for grooming football players; among his classmates was Eddie George, who became one of the best N.F.L. running backs of his era. At the University of Maryland, Plank earned extra money by starting a flower-delivery service, recruiting fellow-students into his sales force as the business grew.

Although Maryland has never been a top football school, it is in Division I, the home of all serious college programs. Plank joined the team as a walk-on, but eventually earned a football scholarship, along with a reputation for enthusiasm; in his senior year, the team’s media guide included a picture of him with his arms raised, above the caption “Kevin Plank (37) breeds emotion.” On the field, Plank worked hard and sweated harder, and he grew to hate the way his cropped cotton T-shirt, known as a shimmel, grew soggy and bunched up beneath his pads. By the time he graduated, with a degree in business administration, he had become obsessed with giving football players the undershirt they deserved.

Plank quickly concluded that the main problem was cotton itself, which functions well in clothing only as long as it remains dry. He tried a series of synthetic fabrics, many of them developed by the lingerie industry, which is almost entirely devoted to snugness, comfort, and support. Nylon seemed promising, until Plank realized that nylon is what is known as a color scavenger: the red Maryland jerseys were turning his white nylon T-shirts pink. Polyester worked better. The fabric is hydrophobic—it repels water—but when treated with a silicone-based solution it becomes slightly more receptive, drawing in moisture and then releasing it. Clothing made from this treated polyester “wicks” sweat away from skin and onto the surface of the fabric, where it can evaporate. By weaving in spandex fibres, Plank could manufacture a shirt that also offered muscle compression, which is said to fight fatigue and aid recovery.

Moisture-wicking clothing wasn’t new: DuPont had introduced an influential wicking fabric called CoolMax in 1986. Compression wasn’t a novel idea, either; women had been wearing spandex-based support hose for decades. But in football locker rooms Plank’s product seemed like an audacious leap forward: an expensive, futuristic-looking T-shirt that promised to keep players dry, comfortable, and compressed. While some players had reservations about playing football in something that looked like the top half of a leotard, many were happy to leave soggy cotton behind. Plank called his product Under Armour, which is essentially a macho synonym for lingerie, and he spelled “armour” the English way not because he wanted to be distinctive but because it fit a memorable toll-free number: (888) 4-ARMOUR.

Today, an upstart company with an experimental product might never find its way into influential locker rooms, because sponsors wouldn’t allow it. Last season, the N.F.L. fined Cam Newton, the incendiary Carolina Panthers quarterback, who is one of Under Armour’s most important endorsers, ten thousand dollars for using visor clips that showed the company’s logo. But in the nineties players and equipment managers were not so constrained. The equipment manager at Maryland, a friend of Plank’s, called his counterparts at other schools, and a Georgia Tech manager named Tom Conner agreed to give sample shirts to his players. He discovered that the shirts kept players comfortable and, just as important, that they allowed his industrial dryers to run faster. (Sixty wet cotton T-shirts could add as much as twenty minutes to each drying cycle.) A few weeks later, Conner called to give Plank his first significant order: about four hundred shirts, at about twenty dollars apiece. For a moment, Plank was silent; he was trying to figure out how he would manufacture that many shirts. “I assumed he was a regional manufacturer looking to broaden his base,” Conner says now. “I never imagined he was just a startup.”

Part of Under Armour’s appeal, in those early days, was its obscurity: it was a grass-roots brand, created by and for football fanatics, and it encouraged players to think of their T-shirts as specialized equipment, like mouth guards or thigh pads. Plank’s initial funding was seventeen thousand dollars, which he had saved from his flower-delivery business, and he spent more than half of it on a futile attempt to patent his invention. He found that there was no effective way to prevent competitors from selling tight T-shirts, so he had to corner the market through speed and charm. When a high-school classmate was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, Plank sent him a package of compression shirts. Although the classmate was cut from the team before he had a chance to proselytize, the word spread from college programs to the N.F.L. and beyond. Top players started requesting Plank’s products, including Deion Sanders, who paid for four shirts with a personal check, and Barry Bonds, who liked the shirts enough to agree to an absurdly cheap sponsorship arrangement: five thousand dollars a season, which was all Plank could afford. When producers from “Any Given Sunday” wanted clothes for their actors, Plank persuaded them to pay for what they used.

Under Armour sometimes seemed in danger of becoming a one-item company, identified exclusively with tight-fitting undergarments, a category now known as “base layer.” Its executives talk, ambivalently, about customers walking into a Nike shop, asking for “under armours,” and being shown to the Nike base-layer section. “That’s a powerful place to be, but that’s a complacent place to be,” Plank says. Slowly, the catalogue grew from compression shirts to compression shorts, and then to a loose-fitting, quick-drying T-shirt called the Performance Grey. As sales and product lines increased, the company invested in marketing campaigns that summoned the core football values of toughness and discipline. One of the most resonant, for a line of football shoes, featured a string of football players ominously intoning the phrase “Click clack,” which was meant to evoke the sound of cleats hitting cement—“the last sound you hear before you step on the field.”

Football players aren’t known for setting fashion trends: the equipment they wear is too specialized, and too bulky, to allow much in the way of personal expression. But part of the reason for Under Armour’s rapid spread is that players liked the way they looked in these ostentatiously tight T-shirts, much the way weight lifters, in the nineteen-eighties, took to spandex shorts and muscle shirts. “We absolutely played on that vanity of guys,” Plank says. “They’ve got these incredible physiques, but no one is showcasing them.” Cam Newton remembers the day, in high school, when he finally persuaded his mother to spend more than a hundred dollars on a long-sleeved Under Armour base-layer set. When he got it, he did what his teammates were doing: he cut off one arm and one leg, in deference to the local fashion. “She was mortified,” he says, remembering his mother’s reaction. “But as a kid you’re only worried about two things: Is it comfortable? And does it look cool?”

In 2004, Under Armour’s sales passed two hundred million dollars, and the next year Plank decided to take the company public. On the day of the I.P.O., shares more than doubled their offering price, and Plank, who retains a majority of the voting stock, became a member of the nation’s corporate aristocracy. He lives with his wife, D.J.—one of his former flower-sellers from college—and two children outside Baltimore, but he also owns a ski lodge in Park City, Utah, and a historic Thoroughbred ranch in Maryland, Sagamore Farm, which will be the home base for a line of old-fashioned Maryland whiskey that he is launching. In January, he flew to New York for Super Bowl week, and though the company had no official presence at the game, Plank toured the city like an honorary N.F.L. executive: in his presence, it was easy to forget that the Super Bowl isn’t, in fact, an Under Armour production.

The company had rented Vanderbilt Hall, in Grand Central Terminal, where tourists and commuters were confronted with an elaborate display of cleats and sticky gloves—the two Under Armour-branded products that the N.F.L. allows to be shown during games. Employees milled around, looking as if they were deciding whether to dash out for a quick marathon. It was Thursday, January 30th, and the company had just announced its revenues* for 2013: $2.33 billion, which included surprisingly high fourth-quarter sales. Shares had jumped by more than twenty per cent that morning, increasing Plank’s net worth by about four hundred million dollars. As a d.j. muted his virtual turntables, Plank ascended the stage, saying, “It’s a very good day for Under Armour.”

The year’s revenues put the company about equal with J. Crew, although nowhere near Nike, which sells ten times as much. In the early years, Plank used to sit down every December to compose a Christmas card to Phil Knight, the Nike chairman, telling him to watch out. As the imaginary rivalry evolved into a real one, Plank’s approach changed: nowadays, he avoids saying the word “Nike,” referring instead, when he must, to “the guys out West.” Nike’s headquarters are in Beaverton, Oregon; Under Armour recently opened an office in neighboring Portland. Plank has given his executives three main tasks this year: sell more to women, sell more internationally, and sell more shoes.

The event at Vanderbilt Hall was a launch party for the company’s most important new product, a lightweight running shoe called Speedform Apollo. Six years ago, Under Armour bought a Super Bowl commercial to promote a sneaker called the Prototype, an ungainly cross-trainer that didn’t catch on. This time, it is hoping to convince skeptical sneaker connoisseurs that being an apparel company is an advantage: Speedform is being promoted as the first sneaker built entirely in a clothing factory—in fact, a Chinese lingerie factory that specializes in padded bras. Many running-shoe companies concentrate on building the perfect sole: Nike touts a technology called Dynamic Support; Brooks sells shoes enhanced by a Progressive Diagonal Rollbar. In creating Speedform, Under Armour concentrated, instead, on the soft part of the sneaker, the upper. The idea was to build on the company’s strength in textiles and clothing—and, perhaps, compensate for its relative weakness in footwear. The heel is stitchless and seamless, like the inside of a bra cup, and the forefoot has a striation on top, to guide the big toe into place. Speedform Apollo is supposed to be a sneaker that fits as well as a compression shirt; an early version didn’t even have shoelaces. Plank claims that it could become Under Armour’s defining product, although his optimism may be less significant than his stubbornness. “We believe like crazy in it,” he says. “But, if it doesn’t work out, it’s not ‘Go and fold up the camp.’ I’m telling you—our company is committed to footwear.”

The next afternoon, Plank was driven downtown, to the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange, where he was to ring the closing bell. As he arrived, he saw Lindsey Vonn, who had hobbled in on crutches a few minutes earlier. After a series of knee injuries, she had withdrawn from the Sochi Olympics so that she could have reconstructive surgery on her anterior cruciate ligament. “Let me do my Mr. Miyagi,” Plank said, looking at Vonn’s stitched-up knee, and making as if to massage it. Plank has become a constant and effective speech-maker, enlivening his earnest corporate paeans with jockish expressions of good cheer. On this afternoon, he joked that the catalyst for Under Armour’s move from Nasdaq to the N.Y.S.E., a few years before, had been the bankruptcy of United Airlines, which freed up the only ticker symbol that he ever wanted. He also talked about how much his seven-year-old daughter loves Vonn, pivoting to a consideration of the way athletes—and, by extension, brands—can transmit self-confidence to their devotees. “There is some little boy and some little girl out there, somewhere, who believe that when they put Under Armour on they can do just a little bit more,” he said. This belief is the key to the company’s continued success, more important than any product and in some ways more reliable: unlike a putatively revolutionary textile or design, it can’t be debunked by a skeptic or mimicked by a competitor. As Plank talked, he kept glancing down at Vonn, who was sitting while everyone else stood. She had her leg propped up on a chair, with a bag of ice and a linen napkin covering her aching knee.

No doubt there are plenty of little girls who take inspiration from Under Armour, but Plank is well aware that they are outnumbered by boys. Although sales to women have been growing, Under Armour’s women’s business accounted for scarcely twenty-five per cent of its revenue last year. Matt Mirchin, the head of marketing, says that the company’s hyper-athletic image attracts men of all ages and body-fat indices—apparently older, softer guys find the brawny advertisements “aspirational.” But in its woman-focussed campaigns the company is learning to adopt a more tolerant tone, targeting “athletic females” as well as female athletes. To this end, it has signed up an extremely athletic female who is nevertheless not an athlete: Misty Copeland, a soloist at American Ballet Theatre, who appears in a new campaign, demonstrating her relevé in lightly branded Under Armour gear.

The company also opened a New York office and showroom, in Chelsea’s Starrett-Lehigh Building, where it installed Leanne Fremar, recently hired away from Theory, as the creative director of women’s products. The culture there is much less macho than the one in Baltimore, which is shaped by Plank’s belief in hard work and hard play. In Plank’s office, there is a huge television flanked by bottles of Dom Pérignon; Fremar’s is decorated with art books and vases. The idea of the Chelsea office is to prove that the company belongs in the fashion world, and that it has learned from its bad old days. “The company was started by a bunch of aggressive, Type A males who played football and lacrosse,” one former executive says. “We didn’t really have a woman’s voice.” The official, derisive shorthand for the old approach to feminizing products is “pink it and shrink it.”

On a recent afternoon in Baltimore, half a dozen of the company’s women’s-wear designers gathered in a showroom to present the upcoming collections to Plank. The room had been set up to resemble a dance studio—one wall had a floor-to-ceiling mirror and a ballet barre—and it was full of products that aimed for sophistication: single-hued, thin-soled sneakers in eggplant or dark blue; leggings with batik stripes or muted animal prints. The room seemed like a provocation aimed not at Nike but at Lululemon, the apparel company known for its yoga gear. (Under Armour has a yoga-oriented line called StudioLux.) Plank was particularly excited about the wide variety of skintight Capri pants, which he saw as a workout staple. “The Capri is happening in men’s, too,” he said. “Men will no longer be in shorts, with nasty white hairy legs sticking out, dry and scaly. There will be a cool legging solution underneath, and a short on top.”

Under Armour is opening a string of flagship stores, and Plank reminded Naroo-Pucci that mannequins should always wear Under Armour on top of Under Armour: shorts over leggings, T-shirts over base layers, tank tops over tank tops. “Just layering, in general,” he said. “Anytime we don’t layer, I have a problem.”

The company’s women’s-wear initiative has expanded its field of competitors. “Justice—I don’t know if you’ve been in there recently,” Naroo-Pucci said. “They are basically copying what we’re doing.”

Plank interrupted her. “Justice? What’s Justice?”

Justice, as many of Under Armour’s best customers may not know, is a chain of more than nine hundred stores, aimed at tween girls. “Imagine the Spice Girls when they were growing up,” Naroo-Pucci said. It wasn’t clear whether Plank found this suggestion useful.

As the company tries to broaden its scope, its message is undergoing a subtle but pervasive shift in emphasis, from sports to fitness. Its early clothes were “armour” for a war on a zero-sum field of play, where success requires a certain amount of violence. (One of its first slogans was a call to arms issued by Eric Ogbogu, a former N.F.L. defensive end who now works for the company: “Protect this house.”) For football players, as for most professional athletes, the goal is victory, not good health—in fact, achieving victory may often mean sacrificing health. Any product that makes hard work a bit easier provides a competitive advantage, or, at least, a modicum of relief. But to a casual exerciser, for whom hard work is the whole point, Under Armour’s marketing can seem paradoxical: the clothes promise to make your life easier and harder at the same time. Often, the “performance” that the company touts is indistinguishable from cosseting: these are clothes guaranteed not to chafe or poke, no matter which mountains you are or aren’t climbing.

In the new, inclusive Under Armour, Plank is learning to speak of athletic activity in holistic terms, reprising the theme of empowerment that Jane Fonda popularized in the eighties. Wearing her own version of base-layer apparel—spandex leotard, lightweight tights, cotton leg warmers, superfluous belt—she promised to help her followers “look better, feel better,” and be “more able to confront life with energy and enthusiasm.” The appeal was emotional, even spiritual, and clothes played a crucial role. “Dress for it,” Fonda wrote. “An exercise outfit helps because it sets this time apart from the rest of the day and makes it matter more.” Fremar, the creative director of women’s products, describes Under Armour’s successful—and expensive—sports bras in similar terms. “Women are willing to invest in something that is going to make them perform better, feel better, make their workout better, make their experience better,” she said. In football or in yoga, the promise is the same: we can be inspired, and possibly sanctified, by what we put on in the locker room.

On that Thursday in Grand Central Terminal, a mannequin wearing the Mach 39 speed-skating suit was mounted, mid-stride, on a platform that might not have seemed out of place at a natural-history museum. “We think we’re going to change the game,” Plank said. “There’s going to be a lot of gold ringing for the United States of America.” At the 2002 Games, Nike outfitted American and Dutch skaters in a multi-fabric suit called Swift Skin; the two teams combined to win six of the ten available gold medals. An innovation that seems to give athletes a small advantage will quickly spread; this year, Under Armour was one of several companies making multi-fabric suits. But an innovation that seems to give athletes a big advantage may suffer a different fate: in 2009, swimming’s governing body banned ankle-length suits, like Speedo’s LZR Racer, on the ground that they were too fast.

Last November, after years of development, Under Armour’s engineers delivered the Mach 39 suit to Salt Lake City, where the U.S. was competing in a Speed Skating World Cup event. There might not be a way to quantify the advantage a football player gets from a well-designed undershirt, but in speed skating it is theoretically possible to judge exactly which suit makes skaters fastest. Plank says that the Mach 39 performed so well in Salt Lake City that one skater wanted to keep it secret: “The reaction was ‘Get it off, quick, because there’s some competitors in there, and we don’t want them to see how fast this suit is.’ ” After some final modifications, the skaters received their suits in early January, and brought them to Collalbo, Italy, where they trained for the Olympics. By the time the athletes arrived in Sochi, the excellence of the suit was taken for granted. Under Armour alerted the media to the tiny dimples, which redirect airflow; to the mesh panel on the back, to keep skaters’ bodies cool; to the off-center zipper, designed to make the neckline more comfortable and, perhaps, to stand out on television. Before the first race began, Steve Sands, who served as NBC’s speed-skating reporter, held up one of the suits and related an anecdote he had heard from an American skater, Patrick Meek: “The coaches from the Dutch are taking pictures of the American suits, just to check ’em out, and find out what’s so good about them.”

It was no big surprise when Meek, who had never posted a top time, finished twentieth in that first race. But the U.S. performance didn’t improve: Shani Davis, the two-time gold medallist, finished eighth in his strongest event, the thousand-metre; Heather Richardson, who’d been given a good chance to win the women’s thousand-metre, finished seventh. On Thursday, February 13th, the Wall Street Journal posted an article suggesting that Under Armour’s much publicized suit had a design flaw. Quoting “three people familiar with the U.S. team,” the Journal suggested that the air vent on the back was causing the suit to inflate, making it harder for skaters to stay properly tucked. Davis, who is personally sponsored by Under Armour, offered a comment that was devastatingly noncommittal. “I would like to think that it’s not the suit,” he said, adding, “I would never blame the suit. I’d much rather blame myself.”

The story spread, adding some narrative momentum to an Olympics that had started to seem rather dull, given all the reports about corruption and terrorism that preceded it. Plank and Haley, his innovation chief, gave interviews to try to quiet the speculation, even as the case against the suit seemed to be dissolving. The Journal noted that Richardson, before the thousand-metre race, had already got a tailor to cover her suit’s vent with rubber. On Friday, the team decided to switch back to its old suits, also manufactured by Under Armour, but the skaters’ performance didn’t improve; the U.S. didn’t win a single long-track speed-skating medal in Sochi.

Under Armour’s executives were in a difficult position: faced with disappointing results in a sport where apparel really can make a difference, they had to argue that the gear hadn’t been so important, after all. In Plank’s view, the collapse in Sochi was partly a crisis of faith. Ideally, athletes aren’t thinking about their gear when they compete. “We tried to cover, on the front end, by giving the team such incredible confidence that when they put this skin on there’s no way they can lose,” he says. But the notion that something was wrong with the new ones had become impossible to ignore. “The athletes started believing that,” he says. “So removing that barrier, I think, was the only option.” If he was relieved when Davis and the others performed no better in the older suits, he isn’t admitting it—he would never want to be seen to be rooting against an athlete, least of all a U.S. Olympian.

As the crisis subsided, Plank returned to the Under Armour campus, to deliver his annual town-hall address to employees. Hundreds of them crowded into the campus’s indoor basketball court, where a stage had been erected, and hundreds more gathered in the corporate cafeteria, where a large video screen was flanked by recent Under Armour products—including, defiantly, a couple of Mach 39 suits. “This company does not point fingers,” he said, sternly, hinting that a less scrupulous C.E.O. might not have had trouble finding someone to blame for the debacle. (One popular theory: having trained in Collalbo, at an elevation of half a mile, the team was unprepared for the greater air resistance in Sochi, which is close to sea level.) “We accept responsibility, but we also know where that responsibility begins and that responsibility ends,” he said. He read the latest statement from Scott Blackmun, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee: “Based on current information, we do not believe the suits were the problem.” Plank went a step further. “We built a great product,” he said.

Perhaps the American skaters hadn’t proved it, but to his way of thinking they hadn’t disproved it, either. Less than a week later, Under Armour announced that it had renewed its sponsorship of the speed-skating team through the 2022 Winter Olympics. That effectively ended the story—at least until 2018, when both Under Armour and the team will be strongly motivated to avoid embarrassment. The company’s stock price barely flinched during the speed-skating collapse, and Plank seemed almost pleased to have some new inspiration for his pep talks. “We’re a little pissed off, and our American speed skaters are pissed off, too,” he said. “So let’s go out and do something about it.” ♦

*An earlier version of this article misstated the company’s earnings as $2.33 billion; this figure represents its revenues.

This article appears in the print edition of the March 24, 2014, issue.

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